I gotta say FF9 (my personal opinion) is the worst FF made and 8 is nothing short of amazng. Although Squall did pretty much fail but no more than Cloud near the end of FF7.

A long time ago they had Bayonet's which were guns with a short pointed blade at the end of the barrel that you could stab people with for melee combat. The Gunblade focuses more on the sword aspect as oppose to the gun.

Its interesting compairing Squall's Gunblades to Seifer's Hyperion Gunblade (which he uses during the entire game).

But I do prefer the gunblade of the one from FFVII Advent Children... forgot the name, sorry.

that is so totaly AWSUM OMFG

I was also as surprised as you are when I stumbled on this article on wikipedia while researching about bayonets and daggers. It seems that Squaresoft (now SquareEnix) got the idea on gunblades from pistol swords.